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Story:Kings of Strife/Part 19
Part Nineteen The inside of the Tower was nothing like Vik had ever seen before. Breathlessly, he stumbled over the wreckage of the Tower's gate. Looking up, he could not see the ceiling; instead, what looked to be a completely different sky greeted his vision. The ground below him was still sand, but the atmosphere was nothing like what he expected. Instead of being surrounded by the plain gray stone bricks that took the Tower's appearance on the outside, Vik found himself standing in what appeared to be the desert itself at night. The Tower was quite wide, but inside the horizon appeared to be miles off in every distance, and amazingly, two large moons were visible in opposite directions. Their light illuminated the otherwise dark plains, and a vague wind blew through the area, slowly and lazily brushing sand grains across the ground. Vik stood in awed silence. “How in the eight heavens...?” An idea took hold of the Nneonian, and he backed out of the Tower towards the entrance that he came through. The destroyed cryptic gates lay scattered about as usual, and once he arrived in the Mirage Desert again, heat slammed into Vik’s body once again like a wave. Stunningly, the sun was high in the sky once again, and the twin moons were gone, as was the wind. The entire climate had changed before Vik could even blink. “What kind of place is this…?” He could not help but whisper to himself in awe as he stumbled back inside, only to trip over a piece of broken black metal on the ground. The gate’s debris reminded him of his mission, and Vik shook his head slightly, as if to get rid of the cobwebs around his mind. ‘I’m here on a mission, not for sightseeing.’ Returning to the Tower's ethereal atmosphere, he was surprised to notice a tall spiral staircase that ascended into the sky, mere feet in front of him. It had not been there before. Standing where he was, brow knit tightly without comprehension, Vik frowned. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever understand how this place works… but I don’t have to understand it to conquer it.’ The Nneonian walked towards the illusory staircase, glancing constantly around himself with alert caution. The wind accelerated the higher Vik rose on the stairs, eventually getting to a point that it began to buffet his face and whirl his curly hair around. He grunted in frustration as he continued to climb the ever-higher spiral staircase. ‘Even the elements are trying to fool me!’ The winds continued to rise in intensity; they smashed into him, threatening to blow his bags away and almost entirely impede his progress. What seemed like a tornado of sand began to whirl around the staircase, blocking off the staircase from the outside atmosphere and forcing Vik to clench his eyes shut. ‘I must… keep… going!’ He endured, back bent and elbow shielding his face, and continued to climb slowly. Suddenly the spontaneous desert tornado stopped. Vik at this point had been crawling and pulling himself up from the stairs, but when the winds stopped he noticed that he was suddenly on solid ground. Looking up and reluctantly opening his eyes, Vik found himself in an entirely different locale. ‘I understand now why this is the Mirage Tower.’ Gone were the far-off horizons, the twin moons, and the dastardly winds, instead replaced by a completely inorganic and mechanical landscape. No horizon was visible except for a close wall that consisted solely of a drab bronze-tinted menagerie of wires and pipes. An entirely solid level of complex wiring and almost impossibly futuristic mechanisms snaked on the walls and interlocked into a common pattern. The floor beneath him was metallic silver, and the staircase beneath him – earlier made of hard stone – was comprised of matching chrome tiles. The stairs dropped down beneath the tiles, and a dead end stood behind him, shrouding the way down in darkness. Vik stood with lost curiosity and ran his hand on the walls around him. Before, in the dark desert of illusion, he could not be bothered to search out the end of the horizon, but now he could see and feel that these walls were real and in front of him. “Could this really be an illusion?” he breathed, fingers tracing indents and wires of functions he could not comprehend. Instead of being as wide as the sands had been below him, the mechanical area Vik now found himself in was a small and cramped corridor with walls on three sides. In front of him was a long passageway that appeared to curve sharply, obscuring his vision of what was ahead. He shook his head and pushed his hair back from his forehead as he began to walk down the corridor. “I must keep going, without hesitation.” Unlike the constant shifting of sands and winds in the “floor” below, here his voice was audible and sharp. The only other sound on this mechanical floor was one of ambiance; a constant ticking or whirring, like a giant clock, rung from every possible angle, as if coming from the walls themselves. At first, the noise from the area was small and off in the distance, but the further Vik went down the curves of the area, the more prominent they became and the more he noticed them. What began as a simple, ambient ticking began to slowly become louder and louder. It wasn't long after he first became startled by the ticking that Vik saw the carvings on the floor. Once he noticed them for the first time on the floor, Vik realized that the marks had been there since his entrance on the floor. Among the technological environment, there were noticeably no sharp corners or pointy edges, so he knew something was unnatural when it became clear that the entire floor had an unending crack that trailed in the same direction Vik walked. The thin chasm cut into the smooth surface of the chrome floor and continued to drive down its field ever forward. The appearance of the marks filled Vik with both a sense of confusion and enlightenment, along with terrible fear. Whatever caused the marks was likely responsible for the destruction of the gate to the Tower; in other words, the arbitrator of the marks was likely an Ouroboros agent who was in search of the Crystal, just like him. This agent was his enemy. Vik flexed his left hand and started advancing faster, now following the marks instead of exploring in wonder. He tried to swallow the fear building in his chest that bubbled up whenever he thought of the Ouroboros agents. The futuristic floor was oddly lit when he had entered it, glowing with artificial light that seemed to radiate from the chrome ceiling, but now it gradually grew darker and darker as he followed its winding path. After what felt like half an hour jogging behind the chasm on the floor, Vik realized that the marks he trailed behind were likely caused by a weapon, one that was being dragged. The weapon had to have been huge in order to thoroughly destroy the tall gate at the entrance of the Tower, and it was sharp enough to leave a continuous cut in a floor of chrome metal. ‘What sort of beast am I going to be up against?’ In response to his question, the scar on Vik’s temple started to pulse with pain, and he shivered. The soldier turned a rounded corner, and he was met with another spiral staircase that rose into the sky. The metal corridors widened around the staircase until it made another dead end, and the chrome silver ceiling opened up at the top to let the staircase rise into darkness. The skid marks on the floor continued up the stairs. Vik gulped before starting his second ascension. “No hesitation.” Unlike the first floor, this time Vik was met with no sand that buffeted his skin, though the wind did begin to pick up once he was surrounded by darkness. This was no tempest like before, though, and did little more than ruffle Vik’s clothes about slightly. Above him was only darkness, but before long, he landed on a softer step, and the horizon suddenly became carpeted by white. After taking in the new environment awaiting him, Vik found his breath whisked away. The wind from the staircase continued here, and now carried with it a chill that seemed to breathe cold air down Vik’s spine. All around him stretched a great, unending plain of pure snow, untouched by footprints or human activity in any direction. Towards the horizon, off in the distance, Vik could see rising deep brown rock, and even further behind the mountains bordering the plain existed an amazingly dark yet vibrant night sky. This air seemed to completely invalidate the walls bordering around the Tower, and beautiful views of stars, colorful nebulae, and two bright moons seemed to state that the Nneonian had entered an entirely new world. Even though the sky was pitch black, the constellations were so vibrant that the air was not very dark at all, especially not in contrast to the bright white ground of deep snow. Unlike the first floor, which was lonely and empty with its darkness, this plain felt natural and bountiful, and the two moons resting in the sky no longer stood opposite each other. Now, they occupied the same region of space, and they eclipsed each other directly in front of Vik’s vision. Both of the celestial bodies took up a great deal of the sky and let off a luminescent light blue glow, so translucent and fragile in their shining that they looked to be twin suns of innocence. This was no desert of death or tundra of lies – it was a spectacle of wonder, not unlike the sublime beauty of Mount Gulg. Vik instinctively smiled in speechless wonder, and turned around in circles in the shin-deep snow in order to see as much of the plain as he could before he spotted the chasm once again. Now, the marks effortlessly tore through the snow, following a single set of footsteps that pointed forward from the staircase opening, going into the odyssey of snow. Vik paused when he noticed both signs, his childish wonder instantly melting into dread and adrenaline. Looking ahead, Vik followed the inconspicuous footsteps with his eyes and his feet. As he started to move, he pulled on the rifle that had been hanging on his back and snapped on a long-range scope to its cold metal body. ‘This is the one. My enemy is close.’ He followed along until finally, after a small hill that preventing him from seeing all in front of him, the Nneonian saw the Ouroboros agent that had created his trail. The enemy marched forward, huge and glistening in bulky silver armor, beneath which a dark green cape billowed outward in the gentle wind. Behind the Knight, whose helmet had three conspicuous horns, dragged a massive lance-like weapon, easily longer than the enemy was tall and as wide as a man’s torso. It was this gargantuan weapon that left a chasm behind the Knight as they walked forward, toward the horizon of the great illusory plain. Vik froze. Suddenly his weaponry seemed less than adequate. He had a knife, a pistol, and a rifle with a bayonet on it; enough to take down a few men, for sure, but less effective on armored foes with cannon-sized spears. Such an enemy was intimidating enough, but if they were anything like the Black Knight was… ‘I said I would not hesitate,’ Vik thought as he raised his rifle. ‘Even with a helmet on, two or three good shots to the head will be enough to knock anyone out.’ If the Nneonian was lucky, the bullets from his rifle would aim true, and the enemy would be unconscious long enough for Vik to grab the hidden Crystal and escape the Tower. He did not necessarily want to kill them, but if it came down to it, that would be better than him meeting his own death. With a deep breath and unsteady hands, Vik closed one eye and let the other look through the long-range scope on his rifle, and he let the centerpoint of the glass hover over the back of the enemy’s horned helmet. ‘Even at this range, I won’t miss.’ He took another deep breath and pulled the trigger. Not even half an instant later, the armored Knight suddenly stopped walking and whirled back towards him, at the same time that Vik’s rifle exploded with power. Shocked, Vik kept his widened eye looking right through the scope of his gun, so he could clearly see the Knight look right at him before the sound of his gun could have possibly reached their ears. His bullet traveled fast and true, cutting through the windy air without an instant’s delay, but in the split second it took to arrive at the Knight’s forehead, they moved even faster. The Knight raised their massive metal lance and swung it singlehandedly so that it pointed right at Vik’s scope, perfectly in the middle of the bullet’s course. The lance intercepted the bullet, and Vik could see splinters of bronze metal burst apart in every direction once meeting the tip of the Knight’s humongous weapon. “Fuck me.” The Nneonian lowered his weapon and his shoulders, and the expletive he whispered was all that he could think of in reaction. His body shivered strongly, as if writhing in stationary despair, and his jaw went slack as he saw the Knight lower their weapon. When before they marched forward slowly and with discipline, now the Knight rushed toward Vik with unrestrained power, bursting through the snow and pulling their huge lance behind them without any difficulty. “No,” Vik muttered, his body trembling visibly. The sheer intensity of the Knight running after him, like a bull chasing a mouse, removed any trace of courage from his body and froze his veins cold. Like with the Knight of shadows and the treacherous Hasey, Vik was petrified by an overwhelming feeling of weakness. “No,” he said again, this time with a clenched jaw. “Not again!” He raised his rifle and took aim at the armored enemy again. “I can’t fail here!” With shaking arms, he closed his eye and looked within the scope again before firing at the Knight’s helmet. Without losing a beat, the Knight swung their lance in the path of the bullet with ridiculous speed, destroying the projectile in midair once again. ‘This isn’t working,’ Vik realized as he fired again, and again, and again. None of the bullets met their mark, as the Knight effortlessly swung their massive weapon and parried the gunshots. Before Vik could comprehend the entirety of his situation, the Lance Knight was upon him. Terrifyingly silent and even more imposing in close range, the Knight acrobatically raised their weapon and swung at Vik from only a few paces away. As he lowered his rifle from his eye, Vik felt a familiar sense of dread. ‘I’ve felt this fear before.’ He ducked, his body moving entirely on instinct, and fell to his feet. The horizontal swipe from the gigantic weapon had come ridiculously close to cleaving Vik in half, and as it was the attack was swift and strong enough to rip open his ragged shirt. Tossing his rifle into the crook of his arm, Vik pounced sideways, rushing to get out of reach of the Knight. Unlike him, the caped one needed no time to come up with a strategy, and continued to silently rush him whilst slamming their lance down in search of Vik’s body. Snow exploded upwards from each impact, which Vik barely managed to dodge without being hit. If even one of those attacks hit him, Vik knew, he would be annihilated. Both the adrenaline and the fear running through the Nneonian’s veins were overwhelming. Despite the stunning cold of the snow he was scrambling through, Vik’s brow was sweating from his task. He slung his rifle around his neck once again in time to pull out his pistol, and wildly shot at the advancing Knight as he fled from them. The bullets were weak and completely ineffective, of so little concern to the armored one that they did not even bother to swat these away. They hit into the massive armor covering their hulking frame and only ricocheted off into the snow. Despite their huge frame, the Lancer was fast. Vik turned around frequently to shoot his pistol and he almost tripped over his feet in his frantic absconding, but even considering that he would have thought that he could outspeed the Knight. This was not the case. The hulking Knight loomed closer and closer, each smash of their weapon coming closer to smashing Vik to pieces. So intense was his struggle, Vik could not think or strategize a way out of his situation. If anything, only one thought bounced around in his head, barely audible to himself beneath the cacophony of his wailing survival instincts. ‘I’m going to die here.’ Not a second after he realized this, Vik turned back once again to see the Knight much closer than they were a moment ago, with their weapon raised into the sky and an illusory fire burning out from beneath their helmet. Time seemed to slow as Vik’s eyes widened and he looked right at the falling lance, cutting through the frozen air and glistening, cold steel threatening to burst into flames from pure fury. Without a doubt, this falling tower of hatred would crush Vik to little more than a puddle in the snow. For an instant, he froze again, his body reflexively tensing up in the face of extreme adversity. Then Vik saw Hasey. The boy was not really there, he knew – but he was there. Beneath the armor, Vik could see Hasey’s slim frame, looking down on him with a sadistc, lying smile. In the same instant he saw the Black Knight, his own immutable armor beneath the glistening silver protection of the Lance Knight, and though Vik could not see his face, he could feel a similar sadistic smile on it. This smile was different from Hasey’s deranged and chaotic smile, though; it was personal, an arrow notched right at Vik’s heart, one that had already flown right through the corpses of his fallen friends. Vik knew he could not die here. All of this happened impossibly fast, and afterwards Vik moved faster. He had not even had time to blink before resolving to live, and as he planted his feet into the ground, he dropped his pistol and grabbed the rifle floating behind him on a strap. He pulled the rifle in front of him protectively at an angle, slightly above his head, so that hopefully it would shield his face from instant impact and destruction from the ever-encroaching lance. As the Black Knight had done – the Lance Knight seemed to anticipate his movements. They shifted their stance even faster than Vik had moved, with incredible speed that he had not seen since clashing with the obsidian warrior in North Norzaven, so quickly that their huge body was almost invisible. As soon as Vik had prepared himself to block the falling lance, the Knight twisted their arm and shifted their waist, so that the weapon’s trajectory curved in midair and now aimed right for Vik’s head. Just like that, in less than a second, Vik had already been outmaneuvered and trapped on the edge of death once again, and once again he resolved not to give up. He twisted his body like the Knight did but slower, holding the rifle in front of the lance’s trajectory in order to protect his face. The movement was not quick enough to be clean, so when the lance hit his rifle and crushed it into pieces instantly, Vik felt pain in his arm and his side from the awkward stance he was in when he took the hit. After the second or two of insanely quick movement, Vik realized that his reactions afterwards came slower than usual. He was already flying in the air from the impact of the lance when he realized that his steel Sorachi III rifle had basically exploded in his hands from the power of the strike, and that the shrapnel from the destroyed weapon had cut his hands and his face. By the time he landed roughly in the snow, at least twenty feet away from the Knight, Vik felt the scar on his temple throbbing, and only then did he realize that he was still alive. The blood that stained the snow beneath his hands reminded him further that he still lived, and that the status of his mortality was tenuous. ‘I have to keep running,’ he thought to himself as he slowly stood, hands slippery from blood. A warm liquid fell down into his left eye and he instinctively closed it, rubbing at his temple and pulling away a finger covered in blood. A familiar sound of metal on metal echoed from beneath him, and Vik took off in a run again. Now he ran aimlessly, with no options to defend himself. He could not see out of his left eye, not with the blood from his cut brow running right into it, and he clenched the other one closed out of passion from his run. ‘I still have a knife,’ Vik reminded himself, ‘and a mission. I will not die here. I will not die here!’ The knife would not help him if he came in contact with the Knight again, but knowing he had it was reassuring, as was the fact that he still had a purpose. When he opened his eyes again, briefly and to keep his bearings, Vik saw a black staircase in front of him, just past the edge of a snow-covered cliff. He looked back in disbelief, but this time the Lance Knight was further behind him, and was not swinging their huge weapon. ‘Have I gotten faster?’ he wondered for just a moment; ‘Or have they slowed down? No. That’s impossible.’ Vik’s breath came to him ragged, and his entire body ached with pain just as it did before he passed out before finding the Mirage Tower, but he knew this time he would not give up. This time, he had no choice. He ran faster with a goal in place, so fast that he could neither breathe nor think, and the only sensation within his body was pain and fear. That was enough. Snow had started to fall during his confrontation with the Knight, and only now Vik noticed it as small freezing flakes of water slapped into his fast and forced him to clench his eyes shut in response. Rebelliously he opened them constantly, too hesitant to keep his eyes closed because of the possibility that the staircase would disappear if he took his gaze off it for too long. All around him, the world became a pure ivory blur, accentuated only by blood. The Nneonian arrived at the cliff and did not pause for an instant. He had not formulated a plan at all, nor did he have any idea how to reach the impossibly floating staircase in the black abyss of space awaiting him; he acted solely on reflex and his body’s command. Compared to the hellish beast rushing behind him with unending fury, the hell of death in the abyss past the cliff meant nothing to him. Vik ran right up to the edge of the cliff and lept, his blood-stained hands ripping at the wet shreds of his shirt and tearing it off his chest as he sailed through the air. He kept his eyes closed, ambivalent to life and death in this one crucial moment – but his hands met hard ground. They slipped and he almost fell, but he curled his fingers and scrambled to pull himself up onto the stairs that he had somehow landed upon. In the absence of a plan, his body had acted on its own, and he had grasped life. Vik pulled himself up two or three stairs before resting, allowing himself to breathe for the first time in at least a minute. Even doing this simple task brought pain to his chest, but he tried to ignore it by cleaning up his face with the remnants of cloth still gripped in his fists. The cut above his left eye – right where his scar had been, across his temple and ending above his eyebrow – would not close, but it was not dangerously deep. As a precaution, he kept his life eye clenched shut as he silently pulled himself up the stairs. He did not say a word to himself, as if silence would shatter the mirage that had miraculously worked out in his favor. Before long, Vik began to hear more than his ragged breathing and his pounding heartbeat. Something began to resound and echo in the darkness, out beyond Vik’s vision yet deceptively close. All around him was darkness; the spiraling stairs rose higher and higher, past even the starry sky, and every glistening celestial object had long since disappeared. In all possible ways the sounds that Vik began to hear had no logical explanation. Gentle crashing of waves sounded like they were occurring from both of Vik’s sides, and behind him he heard the twinkling of bells. Above and ahead, he heard fragile crackling, like the sound of water audibly freezing. Though they all started off simply, like the mirages they were, soon the sounds amplified in volume, exponentially. Before long, Vik’s ears began to ring, and not long after that, the various elements combined into a veritable symphony of cacophony. Still, Vik slowly kept ascending. His breath returned to him slowly and with difficulty, and slowly Vik realized that he was deathly exhausted. Never before, not even when he had climbed up Mount Gulg over the course of days, did he feel this drained and beaten down. Though he had fled the Lancer, it felt as if the silent adversary had crushed the life out of him, and the apparently endless trudge up the illusory stairs did nothing to aid this loss of energy. If anything, the resounding sounds drained him further, and more than anything Vik wanted to lay down on the stairs and just rest. Just as he was about to succumb to his fatigue, Vik laid his heavy head down onto a stair above him, and felt a vibration. He raised his head in curiosity and opened his good eye to look down beneath him, only to see a silver-clad figure running up the stairs toward him. The Lance Knight had followed Vik even here. Adrenaline and fear burst through his veins once again, almost as boisterously as the Knight had, and Vik pushed himself off the ground. He ran up the stairs just as clumsily as he had ran through the snow, and with the clanging of metal stairs beneath his boots ringing through the air, the symphony of noise multiplied its intensity. The Nneonian kept his hands clasped tightly to his ears, but without the appendages to help him keep his balance, he struggled not to trip and fall down the stairs right into the maw of death. ‘I will not die here. I will not die here!’ Before he could attempt to fool himself into motivation a third time, Vik tripped as his feet hit solid land, and the cacophonous symphony instantly stopped. He took a couple of steps forward to stabilize himself and looked around in surprise with both eyes. A new locale of mirages awaited him, and something told the Nneonian that this was the final tier of the Mirage Tower. The atmosphere was still dark all around him, and the air carried with it a light, listless wind that stood in stark contrast to the urgency Vik felt in his bones. On the ground, besides the pit of dark stairs that descended into chaotic and wild darkness, midnight blue tiles of stone matched the color of the night above. Vik stood on a summit of sorts, likely the top of the entire Tower, and the area only had a diameter of forty feet maximum. With a few cautionary steps, Vik could see that the desolate white hills of the base of the Tower’s interior stretched around on the ground. In front of him, across a short bridge of matching tiled stone, a similar summit stood, though it was little more than a platform that connected to nothing beneath it. Floating on that platform was a Crystal of dreamy violet, lonely, taunting, and shining. The beauty of the jewel took what little remained of Vik’s breath away. He took a single step forward, then another, dumbfounded. “It’s here,” he wheezed, in disbelief. “I made it…” “You are too weak,” a husky and muffled voice echoed behind Vik. Just like before, the Nneonian froze in fear, and this time he had no more energy to evade this state. “You have only prolonged your suffering, insect.” Once again, time seemed to slow for Vik’s consciousness, though this time it worked against his favor. He felt a heavy fist punch right into his side, casually, as if the Lance Knight had simply waved their hand at him. Just as it was with the lance hitting his rifle, Vik found himself on the ground from the strong attack, this time the direct contact bringing him instant agony and dropping him like a stone. His thoughts came to him slowly, like sloshing mud, and he found himself barely conscious due to the all-encompassing pain he felt, everywhere. “I didn’t hear you come up here,” Vik wheezed in between gasps for breath. Tremulously, he rolled onto his stomach and reached out, futilely, to the Crystal floating some distance ahead of him. “How? How did I lose?” “You reach past your limits as a human,” the Knight stated tonelessly as they walked down the bridge connecting the summit to the Crystal’s platform. Their lance was nowhere to be seen, and without it the Knight walked with a straight back and a cape that billowed softly in the wind. Arriving at the Crystal, they stopped and looked down at it with their horned helmet, as if in thought. “So H4 was right, after all. She really did hide the Dream here, within this labyrinth of mirages. It makes sense…” “No!” Vik choked, his entire body trembling. He coughed, and a small clot of blood welled up in his throat and escaped through his mouth. “I won’t let you. That’s mine! I can’t fail again!” The Knight’s helmet tilted toward Vik’s pathetic form once again before shaking in disapproval. “You really are a worthless excuse for a human. Peel your eyes open and see for yourself first hand this rare glimpse of true power, and the future that awaits your wretched world.” The Knight’s voice was canny, as if the helmet they wore masked and morphed the true sound of their voice, but their condescending disdain was clear even then. One of the Knight’s gloved hands reached out to the grab the fist-sized purple Crystal, and the other pulled forth an equal sized Crystal of shimmering golden coloration. The two jewels seemed to be perfect opposites in both color and size, and they both glistened radiant and ethereal in the Knight’s large hands. The moment they grabbed the floating purple Crystal, Vik swore the winds began to intensify. Within moments, the sky started to lighten somehow, in the same vein as the spontaneous sunrises that had decorated the desert below. This was no sunrise, though; if anything, clouds started to gather above the summit of the Tower, and light seemed to unnaturally gather behind them all. “Yes,” the Knight muttered, “Yes!” Their voice began to rise with passion, like trumpets announcing a divine-appointed royal’s appearance, and they raised their hands in similar glorious reverence. “Watch, first-cycle, and tremble! Feel for yourself how the air trembles, the sky darkens; witness for yourself, through eyes blinded by blood and toil without merit, the beginning of the end of the world. Always rejected, always postponed, the true fate of humanity lies ever tenacious and eager to pounce; with this, a pathetic obstacle has been overcome. She thought, in her folly, that she could escape. She deigned that fear and secrecy would best true love and dedication. She was wrong! All of humanity is wrong! The Lord sees all, and his seven Serpents act on his will; even fragmented, the Serpents are immutable, undefeatable, and enduring. Watch, mortal, as I harness the Dream and the Lust! Watch how, despite the obstacles of my better half, I grow, I prosper, and I overcome! Watch as I command the heavens to rend and the very earth to crumble. See for yourself what awaits all the world, and weep with woe! Never lose this memory, this despair, until your breath flees from your body for the last time!” “Why?” Vik croaked. “Why do you let me live? Why have I failed again?” Now the sky had grown impossibly bright, but at an odd angle. The light manifested behind the clouds behind the Tower and coagulated, as if forming into something concrete, like an arrow being notched to a massive celestial arrow, or a javelin being primed in the grip of a ruthless gladiator. The Lance Knight turned their head to Vik, and it seemed to him that its horned, scowling helmet grinned in triumph. “Your time will yet come.” ...End of Part Nineteen. <- Previous Page | Main Page | Next Page ->